The Twelfth Card

recall anything other than a dark raincoat.
    She added, “Oh, one thing. I think he had a Southern accent.”
    Sachs nodded and jotted this into her notebook. She then hooked up a small laser printer and soon had two dozen five-by-seven-inch copies of Unsub 109’s image, with a short description of his height, weight and the fact he might be wearing a raincoat and had an accent. She added the warning that he targeted innocents. These she handed to Bo Haumann,the grizzled, crew-cut former drill instructor who was now head of the Emergency Services Unit, which was New York’s tactical group. He in turn distributed the pictures to his officers and the uniformed patrolmen who were here with the team. Haumann divided the law enforcers up—mixing Patrol with ESU, which had heavier firepower—and ordered them to start canvassing the neighborhood.
    The dozen officers dispersed.
    NYPD, the constabulary of the city of cool, put their tactical teams not in army-style armored personnel carriers but in off-the-shelf squad cars and vans and carted their equipment around in an ESU bus—a nondescript blue-and-white truck. One of these was now parked near the store as a staging vehicle.
    Sachs and Sellitto pulled on body armor with shock plates over the heart and headed into Little Italy. The neighborhood had changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. Once a huge enclave of working-class Italian immigrants, it had shrunk to nearly nothing, owing to the spread of Chinatown from the south, and young professionals from the north and west. On Mulberry Street the two detectives now passed an emblem of this change: the building that was the former Ravenite Social Club, home of the Gambino crime family, which long-gone John Gotti had headed. The club had been seized by the government—resulting in the inevitable nickname “Club Fed”—and was now just another commercial building looking for a tenant.
    The two detectives picked a block and began their canvass, flashing their shields and the picture of the unsub to street vendors and clerks in stores, teenagers cutting classes and sipping Starbucks coffee, retirees on benches or front stairs. They’d occasionallyhear reports from the other officers. “Nothing . . . Negative on Grand, K . . . Copy that . . . Negative on Hester, K . . . We’re trying east . . . ”
    Sellitto and Sachs continued along their own route, having no more luck than anyone else.
    A loud bang behind them.
    Sachs gasped—not at the noise, which she recognized immediately as a truck backfire—but at Sellitto’s reaction. He’d jumped aside, actually taking cover behind a phone kiosk, his hand on the grip of his revolver.
    He blinked and swallowed. Gave a shallow laugh. “Fucking trucks,” he muttered.
    “Yeah,” Sachs said.
    He wiped his face and they continued on.
    *   *   *
    Sitting in his safe house, smelling garlic from one of the nearby restaurants in Little Italy, Thompson Boyd was huddled over a book, reading the instructions it offered and then examining what he’d bought at the hardware store an hour ago.
    He marked certain pages with yellow Post-it tabs and jotted notes in the margins. The procedures he was studying were a bit tricky but he knew he’d work through them. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t do if you took your time. His father taught him that. Hard tasks or easy.
    It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point . . .
    He pushed back from the desk, which, along with one chair, one lamp and one cot, was the only piece of furniture in the place. A small TV set, a cooler, a garbage can. He also kept a few supplies here, things he used in his work. Thompson pulled the latexglove away from his right wrist and blew into it, cooling his skin. Then he did the same with his left. (You always assumed a safe house would get tossed at some point so you took precautions there’d be no evidence to convict you, whether it was wearing gloves or using a booby trap.) His eyes were acting up today. He squinted, put drops in, and the stinging receded. He closed his lids.
    Whistling softly that haunting song from the movie Cold Mountain.
    Soldiers shooting soldiers, that big explosion, bayonets. Images from the film cascaded through his mind.
    Wssst . . .
    That song disappeared, along with the images, and up popped a classical tune. “Bolero.”
    Where the tunes came from, he generally couldn’t tell. It was like in his head there was a CD changer